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buybuydandavis comments on How should negative externalities be handled? (Warning: politics) - Less Wrong Discussion
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Thanks for getting more specific, but you left out the particular part I was asking for.
That's not a particularly identifiable state. If you play basketball for an hour, during that hour I know you're not doing a lot of things. If all I know is that you're not playing basketball, you could be doing a zillion other things, all of which have a different economic value to me.
If you play basketball, that has a range of economic value too, but a much much smaller range than not playing basketball.
Choose an arbitrary action as reference, then! You'll be taking the difference in the end anyway.
This is just a non-physics example of gauge symmetry.
Ok, so if we take the action with the greatest value to me as the reference zero, then all other actions count as negative externalities.
That may be how utilitarians do it, but it isn't the way libertarians do it, and that was the context of the original question. Libertarians set a less than greatest value action as the reference zero. Before they talk about what to do about negative externalities, they need to identify that zero, so they can know what they're talking about when they say "negative externality".
An externality is when A's action results in costs for B who wasn't a participant. B isn't acting at all. And it's usually obvious and uncontroversial what counts as "action" or "inaction" on the part of A.
Which bring me back to my previous question:
You can define a reference zero that way. Libertarians generally do not.